The fauna of the state of Oregon includes a wide array of species.
One way of presenting the fauna of Oregon is classification by lifezone. Oregon is a vastly diverse state in terms of topography and climate. Five of the seven recognized lifezones are identified in Oregon. [1]
Although there are variable reports, some sources report that there are four species of mammals found exclusively in Oregon: the Baird's shrew, the Pacific shrew, the camas pocket gopher, and the red tree vole (North Oregon Coast "distinct population segment"). [2] [3] However, other sources list the red tree vole as present in northern California. According to the Oregon State University libraries Oregon Wildlife Explorer website, one hundred thirty-six mammals have been described, exclusive of marine mammals. Most of these are smaller creatures weighing under one kilogram, active primarily at night, with a tendency towards more inconspicuous ways of life. Some of the larger, more iconic, carnivorous species have been driven from the region. Others are present, but in lesser numbers. [2]
The American Society of Mammalogists provides a more exhaustive listing of species. Grizzly bears are no longer listed. In 2011, it reported that 12 Canada lynx remain. [4]
Elk were heavily hunted in Oregon in the 1800s leading to their extirpation from all but the most inaccessible parts of the Blue Mountains. Legal hunting officially ended in 1909. In 1912 fifteen elk were imported from Wyoming to re-establish huntable herds. The first elk hunting season post re-establishment was in 1933. [5]
The gray wolf was extirpated from Oregon in 1947 and returned in 1999 when wolves from Idaho began to move into the state. [5] The gray wolf populations has been increasing in recent years and is monitored by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. [6] The first confirmed wolf sighting in western Oregon since 1947, known as Journey or OR-7, was born in April, 2009 and OR-7 became the first wolf in modern times to move to California. [7]
The fauna of Maine include several diverse land and aquatic animal species, especially those common to the North Atlantic Ocean and deciduous forests of North America. Some of these creatures' habitats has been reduced or fully removed.
Wolf reintroduction involves the reintroduction of a portion of grey wolves in areas where native wolves have been extirpated. More than 30 subspecies of Canis lupus have been recognized, and grey wolves, as colloquially understood, comprise nondomestic/feral subspecies. Reintroduction is only considered where large tracts of suitable wilderness still exist and where certain prey species are abundant enough to support a predetermined wolf population.
The fauna of the United States of America is all the animals living in the Continental United States and its surrounding seas and islands, the Hawaiian Archipelago, Alaska in the Arctic, and several island-territories in the Pacific and in the Caribbean. The U.S. has many endemic species found nowhere else on Earth. With most of the North American continent, the U.S. lies in the Nearctic, Neotropic, and Oceanic faunistic realms, and shares a great deal of its flora and fauna with the rest of the American supercontinent.
The history of wolves in Yellowstone includes the extirpation, absence and reintroduction of wild populations of the gray wolf to Yellowstone National Park and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. When the park was created in 1872, wolf populations were already in decline in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. The creation of the national park did not provide protection for wolves or other predators, and government predator control programs in the first decades of the 1900s essentially helped eliminate the gray wolf from Yellowstone. The last wolves were killed in Yellowstone in 1926. After that, sporadic reports of wolves still occurred, but scientists confirmed in the mid-1900s that sustainable gray wolf populations had been extirpated and were absent from Yellowstone as well as 48 states.
Wolf distribution is the species distribution of the wolf. Originally, wolves occurred in Eurasia above the 12th parallel north and in North America above the 15th parallel north. However, deliberate human persecution has reduced the species' range to about one-third, because of livestock predation and fear of wolf attacks on humans. The species is now extirpated in much of Western Europe, Mexico, and the contiguous United States, and completely from the British Isles and the Japanese archipelago. In modern history, the gray wolf occurs mostly in wilderness and remote areas, particularly in Canada, Alaska, the Northern United States, Europe and Asia from about the 75th parallel north to the 12th parallel north. Wolf population declines have been arrested since the 1970s, and have fostered recolonization and reintroduction in parts of its former range, due to legal protection, changes in land-use and rural human population shifts to cities. Competition with humans for livestock and game species, concerns over the danger posed by wolves to people, and habitat fragmentation pose a continued threat to the species. Despite these threats, because of the gray wolf's relatively widespread range and stable population, it is classified as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List. In Africa the population of wolves is limited to the northern regions with the African golden wolf north of the Sahara and the Ethiopian wolf in Ethiopia.